Opinion Fahad Zuberi writes on Bharat Mandapam: Decoding the building

Along with these political meanings, the Hall of Nations had inherent formal meanings. The building was a clear articulation of technological competence, its abstracted forms expressed modernist geometric lucidity, and it efficiently served its purpose of hosting exhibitions and events in a free space. The meanings in the structure itself, without the politics of nation building that it came out of and stood for, were those of rationality, functionality, and science. Its expression was rooted in modernism — that a building that serves its purpose efficiently is meaningful, that the honesty of structure and material is beautiful, that less is more, and that technology in itself is enough to create a national building.

The Bharat Mandapam carries very different meanings. It was reported that the structure is inspired from the shape of a conch or shankh, blown during Hindu rituals. The government added that the name of the structure is derived from Lord Basaveshwara’s idea of Anubhav Mandapam. The interiors of the building feature exhibits of India’s traditional art and culture — Surya Shakti to show India’s solar power capabilities and Pancha Mahabhoot, signifying the five elements in Hindu mythology. It’s needless to mention that the building was inaugurated with much religious ritual.

But interestingly, not everything was religious. There was another set of meanings that the government provided. The building expands the outdated facilities of the old Pragati Maidan complex. It meets the functional needs of a convention centre as these have evolved over time. It has a large amphitheatre which, apparently, outdoes the Sydney Opera House. The building has spacious meeting rooms and convention halls and infrastructural capabilities that make it “state-of-the-art” or, to use a more attractive term, “world class”.

Let us be honest. The Bharat Mandapam does fulfil all the functional requirements that the government might have envisioned. However, function is a low-hanging fruit when it comes to designing symbolic public buildings for a country such as India. We need to see beyond numbers, requirements, and energy efficiency. The building has no inherent formal meaning. Unlike the clarity of Hall of Nations, the building lacks any material grammar, and therefore, takes the recourse of pasting meaning on top of itself — like a sticker printed with a brick pattern pasted on an aluminium panel.

What is this sticker? The sticker follows the language of the majoritarian state. The conch is forced upon as an inspiration for something that, at best, looks like a flying saucer. A conch because, in the majoritarian logic, India’s global convention centre must have a form inspired from a Hindu ritual. It represents a mandap, a space in a temple used for ritualistic performance, and then literally pastes traditional art and more mythology in its interiors. While the Hall of Nations expressed secular ideas and the ethos of progress, the Bharat Mandapam, a global convention centre, represents the majoritarian identity.

It is important to note here that there has been a genuine, inclusive search for an “Indian Modern”. The search for meaning in the cold edifices of modern architecture is a 50-year-old struggle for India now. Around a decade-and-a-half after the Hall of Nations was built, the exhibition “Vistara: The Architecture of India”, curated by the great modernist Charles Correa, sought to find an Indian identity within modernity.
Much earlier, there were attempts by people such as architect Sris Chandra Chatterjee during the Swadeshi

Movement to define “Indian Modern Architecture” in opposition to colonial modernity. Despite all of his rational modernist nation building, Jawaharlal Nehru was also touched with this idea and had supported many such explorations. For example, after seeing Habib Rahman’s universal design language for Rabindra Bhavan in Delhi, Nehru insisted that the building should be Indian. The architect altered his design and came up with an elegant abstraction of arches in thin concrete, among other details, for the complex.

It is important to differentiate this search for Indian identity from the hollowness of Bharat Mandapam. For Correa, Rahman, Rewal and others, the search for the “national” in the “universal” of modernism were attempts to find an architecture for a post-colonial nation. Their search spanned from Brihadeshwara temple in Thanjavur to Fatehpur Sikri, and the problem was precisely to synthesise India’s religio-cultural diversity into a modernist idiom.

The Bharat Mandapam is an example of how an honest search for identity in modern architecture has morphed into Hindutva Modernity — a paradigm that projects a majoritarian state while legitimising itself at the incontestable altar of function. A paradigm that does not need the formal explorations of Chatterjee or the abstractions of Rewal and Rahman, but relies on the government’s press release for meaning. While Rewal’s Hall of Nations stood for a project of secular and inclusive nation building guided by modernist principles, Bharat Mandapam is a structure that carries the meanings of majoritarianism stuck on top of its claims of functional resolve. History is evidence that buildings that seek meanings in majoritarianism are not remembered as “national”.

The writer is an independent scholar and researcher of architecture and city studies